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- Convenors:
-
Filippo Menga
(University of Bergamo)
Maria Rusca (The Global Development Institute)
Nathaniel Millington (University of Manchester)
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- Chairs:
-
Filippo Menga
(University of Bergamo)
Maria Rusca (The Global Development Institute)
- Discussants:
-
Nathaniel Millington
(University of Manchester)
Filippo Menga (University of Bergamo)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Anthropocene thinking
- Location:
- Palmer 1.07
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 28 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how the water crisis is framed and spatially unfolds in the Anthropocene. To this aim, it examines emerging dimensions of the water crisis, and considers how theorisations of the Anthropocene have re-shaped our understandings of the water crisis.
Long Abstract:
The popularity of the notion of the Anthropocene seems unstoppable. With it, comes the acknowledgment that environmental degradation and global warming foreshadow an approaching catastrophe that will diminish, if not devastate, life for future generations. The idea of the global water crisis fits well into this narrative. Water is both a global resource, which freely circulates in the atmosphere, and a local one, whose scarcity is felt most by local communities and users. Until recently, the 'global' water crisis was spatially unfolding in a generic and distant 'developing world'. But in the Anthropocene, the water crisis occurs in places that had been so far shielded from it, as evidenced by recent events in Europe and the United States. This is due to the combined workings of climate change and decades of underinvestment in hydraulic infrastructure, alongside broader patterns of austerity, infrastructural inequality, and uneven development.
In this panel we seek contributions that speak to how the water crisis unfolds in the Anthropocene. Submissions are invited on questions that include but are not limited to:
• How can we problematise the idea of the Anthropocene through a critical understanding of the global water crisis?
• What forms of environmental Orientalism mark the political discourse around the water crisis?
• How do discourses of the global water crisis intersect with localized infrastructural inequality and vulnerability?
• What are the discursive politics of global water crisis?
• Can comparative analysis offer insight into contemporary water crisis?
• How should we understand the relationship between water crisis and climate crisis?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 28 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
In the Anthropocene, the water crisis is deeply entangled with the climate crisis. This paper explores how to examine and theorise unprecedented climate extremes. To this aim, it proposes an experimental political ecology to engage with unprecedented floods and droughts.
Paper long abstract:
In the Anthropocene, unprecedented climate extremes are expected to become a new 'normal'. Urban Political Ecology is thus confronted with the challenge of theorizing rapidly changing and unprecedented socionatures under anthropogenic climate change. Hydroclimatic extremes aptly illustrate this, with many regions already experiencing unprecedented events and numerical projections suggesting this trend will worsen in the coming years. This will significantly affect the ability of different social groups to respond to and recover from future climate extremes. It also raises questions on how they might (re)constitute future political formations and imaginaries, and what societal responses they might elicit. In this paper I argue that the theoretical task brought about by these emerging socionatures demands new paradigms and analytical approaches. To this aim, I present two experimental approaches to engage with unprecedented urban futures. The first consists of scenarios combining the physical characteristics of unprecedented hydroclimatic extremes with political ecology examinations of how power and variability in the exercise of agency shape societal responses to these events. In the second experiment I collaborate with political ecologists and modelers to speculatively bring about a better world in response to hydroclimatic extremes. Although both experiments depart from past and present logics of colonial violence, racism, capitalism and climate change, they explore competing notions of the unprecedented. By engaging with both desirable and undesirable urban futures of hydroclimatic extremes, I seek to pluralise urban futures and to lay the foundations for a future-oriented political ecology of the unprecedented.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation I will look at common perceptions and misrepresentations of the water crisis by taking as a case study the increasing popularity of runanthons, i.e. long-distance walks or runs to raise money for a charitable cause.
Paper long abstract:
The human condition in the Anthropocene is marked by a persistent obsession over a looming catastrophe and an unresolved dispute over who is responsible for it. Against this backdrop, a sense of urgency about the global water crisis has entered the political and corporate discourse, and in humanity’s quest to solve it, we are all called to rise to the challenge. In this presentation I will look at common perceptions and misrepresentations of the water crisis by taking as a case study the increasing popularity of runanthons, i.e. long-distance walks or runs to raise money for a charitable cause. Runathons are both a public event and an individual project that revolves around sharing with others a personal sacrifice, or in some cases, even a pseudo-martyrdom, and they encapsulate well the main features of the modern neoliberal water activist of the early Anthropocene.
Paper short abstract:
Virtual water "trade" literature has provided an understanding of the global water crisis at the global level but literature regarding small-scale dynamics is still missing. A re-conjunction of virtual water literature with the political ecology tradition is here attempted.
Paper long abstract:
The literature on virtual water "trade" reflects the food trade dynamics in terms of water susinability and water "paradoxes" ( Hoeksta 2013) . Where water is pumped from water-scarce environments and sold abroad to affluent countries, the water-scarcity virtual water export is verified. Virtual Water Hegemony verifies where big agro-business companies have the power to decide water irrigation dynamics. This concept will be tested at a local scale.
This paper presents the case of a "bad virtual water" case, in Sicily, where not only water is pumped from a vulnterable aquifer for the benefit of the "made in Italy" agricultural business, but also local communities and farmers have a negative outcome out of the crop trade of tomatoes.
The Tomatoes from Pachino, sold all over Italy and abroad, are grown in a Climatic Hot Spot, subject to climatic extremes ; perception of water quality and quantity has been investigated through face-to-face interviews with farmers and key stakeholders. At the same time, monitoring of the aquifer was discountinued as soon as the Water Framework Directive was enforced in Sicily for Groundwater Monitoring because the aquifer was not among the "aquifers of interest" of the region.
Private sector , intermediaries and the mafia are extracting the most of the profits out of the tomato business, leaving the local environment and the community with a situation of vulnerability and extreme fragility.
The concept of Virtual Water Hegemony will be tested for this apparently insignificant and small scale case of study.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will set out the factors that made Jamaican small farmers vulnerable to drought in the 1990s, including agricultural reforms and an unequal water infrastructure, and explore a range of adaptation and coping strategies that they used to mitigate the impact of drought.
Paper long abstract:
Of all natural disasters, drought has the most far-reaching impact on society and the environment. Informed by the growing interdisciplinary body of work on water (in)justice, this paper explores how Jamaican small farmers in the 1990s were affected by a series of droughts. It will argue that they were vulnerable to the impacts of these droughts because of where they lived, the type of land cultivated and crops grown, an underdeveloped rural water infrastructure, lack of government support during the droughts, and agricultural reform and other neoliberal policies. But Jamaican small farmers were not just passive victims of the droughts. The paper will also set out a range of (mostly reactive) adaptation and coping strategies that they used to mitigate the multiple and varied impacts of the droughts. And it will show that when pushed to the brink, small farmers did not hesitate to resort to open protest to improve water access, albeit with varied effect.
Paper short abstract:
The ‘global’ water crisis is a ‘canary in the coal mine’ of a bigger development calamity. Technical fixes abound, but are inadequate. This paper will examine what ecologically-centred, post development visions in Myanmar might mean for the future of water globally.
Paper long abstract:
From famine-inducing drought in the Horn of Africa to sweeping floods in Australia to the Last Days of the Mighty Mekong (Eyler 2019), the ‘global’ water crisis reflects a deeper development calamity. Such disparate crises bring new meanings to euphemistic ‘cost of living’ discourse. In response, global actors scramble for technical solutions, ranging from heavily polluting, expensive desalination in the Gulf States to water trucking for the millions of people displaced across Somalia. Yet the cohabitation of abundance and scarcity are not inevitabilities of the Anthropocene, nor amenable to technical fixes. Water is instead a ‘canary in the coalmine’ of the intersection between global development and ecological limits.
This paper aims to build upon political ecology and post development literature through exploring visions and practice towards water in Myanmar. In a region where governments and development banks have long espoused the benefits of hydropower, opposition has gone beyond anti-dam to being uniquely propositional. Rivers have become symbols of unity and resistance against uneven development backed by military violence. This paper will examine how the Salween and Myitsone galvanised not only civil society solidarity, but also the potential for re-imagining ‘development’ in Myanmar. The analysis concludes by exploring what Myanmar’s experience might mean for challenging dominant development paradigms that are inextricably linked to and exacerbating the ‘global’ water crisis.
Paper short abstract:
If the global water crisis is a governance crisis, I argue that such governance crisis is also a crisis of narratives and imagination and I discuss how storytelling through different media – video, podcast, photography – can help to imagine and prefigure new water communities in the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
We are often told that the global water crisis is a governance crisis. I argue that such governance crisis is also a crisis of narratives and imagination: water professionals often lack the capacity to elaborate and appreciate alternative ways of understanding and managing water. The idea of the Anthropocene expresses the need and the urgency for such capacity of imagination and prefiguration.
Reflecting on an action research with journalists and scientists in the Nile basin, and on a conversation between artists and researchers around the idea of water representations, I will discuss how storytelling through different media – video, podcast, photography – can be mobilized to imagine and prefigure new - and more than human - water communities. I will also share the experience of using storytelling and those media in the classroom, as a contribution towards a pedagogy for water education fit for the Anthropocene.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to examine the ways in which global water scarcity is instrumentalised as a discursive tool to expand the state’s power to have greater control on water resources in domestic and transboundary settings, particularly in the Middle East.
Paper long abstract:
Water scarcity has long been a central focus of academic and policy studies on the politics of water. While issues related to the availability and use of water have been traditionally associated with the Global South, the Global North also experiences water scarcity today. The expanded geographical range of water scarcity, as well as its increased severity, has led many states to combine supply-side solutions (e.g., dam building) and demand-side mechanisms (e.g., good water governance) to cope with the issue. The same process has also granted them the power to construct a sense of urgency in water policymaking and implement their decisions with less contestation. The key role played by discourses on global water scarcity in shaping the process of water policymaking remains relatively understudied, though. This paper seeks to examine the ways in which global water scarcity is instrumentalised as a discursive tool to expand the state’s power to have greater control on water resources in domestic and transboundary settings. Drawing on critical approaches to development, the paper looks at how political, economic, and environmental interests converge or clash in the discursive terrain of global water scarcity. Particular focus is placed on Turkey, an emerging actor in global water governance, to illustrate the social construction of water scarcity and the implications of this process for water governance on multiple levels and scales. Thus, the paper aims to deconstruct the meaning of global water scarcity and provide an alternative perspective to the politics of water, particularly in the Middle East.
Paper short abstract:
Balancing national interest, regional collaboration and economic sustainability will be more important in a world where climate change creates a different distribution of key resources such as water.
Paper long abstract:
Perennial flooding that impacts countries and communities within the Lake Chad Basin Development Areas (LCBDA) annually has increased in recent years due to climate change. Its negative impact on the communities is further accentuated by the absence of multinational and cross regional cooperation between the governments of Nigeria and Cameroon. As a result, the affected communities have seen an increase in divisiveness, despair and reduced economic sustainability. These factors foster the growth of extreme and violent fringe groups.
Likewise the disputes between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over the waters of the River Nile, which has intensified since 2011, has heightened political tensions. In July 2022, after Ethiopia commenced the third-stage filling operations of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Egypt and Sudan bristled over the stalled tripartite negotiations. While each country is entitled to take actions to support its citizenry, if the broader region is destabilized such support will not be sustainable.
Balancing national initiatives with a socio-economic perspective on a larger, trans-national region will be increasingly important due to climate change. Cross-regional cooperation, with fundamentally similar development aspirations and approaches, can lead to better outcomes for local communities, larger nation-states and geopolitical regions. It can be argued that improved outcomes also support more stable political institutions which further help the populace.
Using these examples as context, the paper will present key factors for leaders to consider when confronting regional environmental decisions - either planned or unplanned.